Director Roger Michell has made a few movies I really like (“Changing Lanes,” “Enduring Love”) and a few movies I didn’t like as much but found merit in (“The Mother,” “Notting Hill”), but never an outright miscalculation as baffling as “Hyde Park on Hudson,” a dramatically inert, bizarrely fluffy retelling of a historical footnote that its filmmakers clearly struggled to hang a feature film on. Despite the presence of, in a bit of bravura casting, Bill Murray as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the story surrounding this performance — about a pre-World War II visit from the king and queen of England, and an affair between Roosevelt and a distant cousin of his — is so slight as to render even Murray’s inate watchability pointless.

That the movie’s primary point of view is that of the cousin Daisy, played by Laura Linney, is even more problematic. A far more interesting movie would have put us in Roosevelt’s perspective and not with the passive character who seemingly exists to serve him. Furthermore, scenes with King George VI (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) are sketched as lightly and unmemorably as possible, particularly given how recently “The King’s Speech,” which followed those same figures, was released. Throw in a blowsy but all too brief turn from Olivia Williams as Eleanor Roosevelt and the film feels more like a work of gossip than a work of drama, in which half-heard rumors and whispers about a person seem to suffice for character development. Frustratingly, “Hyde Park on Hudson” never even attempts at any deeper exploration of its characters, and its limited point of view is hardly an excuse for that. $29.98 DVD, $34.98 Blu-ray.

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“HYDE PARK ON HUDSON”

Director Roger Michell has made a few movies I really like (“Changing Lanes,” “Enduring Love”) and a few movies I didn’t like as much but found merit in (“The Mother,” “Notting Hill”), but never an outright miscalculation as baffling as “Hyde Park on Hudson,” a dramatically inert, bizarrely fluffy retelling of a historical footnote that its filmmakers clearly struggled to hang a feature film on. Despite the presence of, in a bit of bravura casting, Bill Murray as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the story surrounding this performance — about a pre-World War II visit from the king and queen of England, and an affair between Roosevelt and a distant cousin of his — is so slight as to render even Murray’s inate watchability pointless.

That the movie’s primary point of view is that of the cousin Daisy, played by Laura Linney, is even more problematic. A far more interesting movie would have put us in Roosevelt’s perspective and not with the passive character who seemingly exists to serve him. Furthermore, scenes with King George VI (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) are sketched as lightly and unmemorably as possible, particularly given how recently “The King’s Speech,” which followed those same figures, was released. Throw in a blowsy but all too brief turn from Olivia Williams as Eleanor Roosevelt and the film feels more like a work of gossip than a work of drama, in which half-heard rumors and whispers about a person seem to suffice for character development. Frustratingly, “Hyde Park on Hudson” never even attempts at any deeper exploration of its characters, and its limited point of view is hardly an excuse for that. $29.98 DVD, $34.98 Blu-ray.